Rob Ainsley is hoping for a proper World Champs legacy
The UCI Worlds confirm Yorkshire’s cycling status. Rob Ainsley hopes for a legacy beyond yellow bikes...
“I don’t fancy the prospect of Geoffrey Boycott glaring at me from a Bank of Yorkshire £10 note”
I’ve not cycled everywhere yet, though of course it’s on the list.
But I’ve biked in a few countries: 35- to 40-ish, depending on whether, for instance, you count Kosovo as part of Serbia or Taiwan as part of China.
I’ve also ridden all round Britain, on most of the National Cycle Route network. And I don’t have a bad word to say about a single mile of it. Well, maybe with the exception of one particular mile on the Thames Path, east of Woolwich.
I’m often asked for my favourite country for cycling. Yorkshire, I reply. It’s not a country, people say. Which is technically true, just as it’s technically true that you can’t drive onto the pavement to park. But in many ways, the county I was born and live in behaves more like a small nation. A Portugal or a Finland, say, of comparable population and GDP.
Guitarist Frank Zappa supposedly said that to be a proper country you need, “A beer and an airline – at the very least, a beer”. Planewise, there’s Leeds’s Jet2.com, though a celebrated Hale and Pace sketch (it’s on YouTube) imagines ‘Yorkshire Airlines’. As with Harry Enfield’s ‘outspoken Yorkshireman’ character (also on YouTube), such stereotypes are
viewed in Yorkshire as grotesque caricatures by many. And by equally many as role models.
We have plenty of excellent beers, though. And now a whiskey. And more importantly – something Zappa unaccountably omitted – an internationally recognised bike race. Since we started the 2014 Tour de France we’ve run an annual Tour de Yorkshire. Our current hosting of the 2019 Road World Championships is merely further proof of our cycling pedigree.
It’s easy to make the case for Yorkshire as a cycling land. The epic Dales, and their mighty passes – Buttertubs, Fleet Moss, the Stang. The compact Moors, where the remote-feeling ridgetops are only five minutes’ scoot down to a valley-bottom village cafe, and 20 minutes’ cycle back, up the 1 in 3. The hidden-gem Wolds, with their dry valleys and nondry pubs. Here’s where the whiskey is made.
We have Britain’s best railtrail, the Scarborough to Whitby Cinder Track – great for family activities, such as hospital visits to relatives who fell off while riding the rough bits out from Ravenscar. We have the longest bridge in the world you can cycle over, the Humber Bridge, linking City of Culture-energised Hull with, er, some fields on the other side. We have a London-style segregated Cycle Superhighway: CS1 from Leeds to Bradford, and from there to the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, enabling a splendid urban loop and a feeling cycle campaigners know very well: going round in circles. And we have two of Britain’s top ‘cycling cities’ – York and Hull – where a relatively high percentage of the population gets around by bike.
The Tour de Yorkshire has brought millions of pounds into local economies. There have been longterm benefits, too, as anyone knows who’s cycled the delightfully smooth Tour-grade tarmac in many parts of the Dales, compared to most of Britain’s potholed disgraces. Having the UCI Worlds in these legacy-aware times (yellow bikes from the 2014 Tour still joyously decorate buildings) is further to our advantage. Such as, hopefully, hastening repair of the bridge on the UCI Men’s course near Reeth that was destroyed in July’s floods...
Proper nationhood may not be in prospect. Just as well: I don’t fancy the prospect of Geoffrey Boycott glaring at me from a Bank of Yorkshire £10 note. But there’s talk of devolution, and that would present opportunities and threats for cycling. If a One Yorkshire assembly had more powers over spending – maybe even raising – money, that could benefit us with better cycling infrastructure.
Happy international cycling. Even if it’s ‘only’ in the Dales.